Liz Cheney's Senate Bid Endorsed by Majority of Cheney Family

The Cheneys pictured in 2000. From left: Mary, Liz, and Lynne.
(AP / THE ATLANTIC WIRE)

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Liz Cheney, daughter of former vice president Dick Cheney, will likely enjoy the support of nearly everyone in her family as she takes on sitting Wyoming senator Mike Enzi next year. The only known exception is her sister Mary, who told Politico that Liz's newly-vocal opposition to same-sex marriages — like Mary's — means she is "not supporting Liz's candidacy." But three-out-of-four blood relations isn't bad.

In a series of emails to me this week, as the news of her break with her sister spread, Mary wrote, “I’m not supporting Liz’s candidacy.” She later clarified: “By supporting, I mean not working, not contributing, and not voting for (I’m registered in Virginia not Wyoming).”

The "break" referred to above was Liz Cheney's Sunday Fox News appearance, in which she stated her opposition to same-sex marriage, a move provoked by attack ads from an outside group that suggested Liz supported the practice. Mary, too, clearly was under the assumption that Liz condoned at least one same-sex marriage, quickly taking to Facebook to repudiate her sister's remarks. "[Y]ou're just wrong," she wrote, "and on the wrong side of history." (Dick, who'd been vocally supportive of Mary's marriage, had a slight change in tone as he took Liz's side of the fight.)

Mary wanted to make one other thing clear to Zengerle in their discussions. "The best she could say of the sister who was once her close friend and confidante," he writes, "was a final postscript: 'I am not saying I hope she loses to Enzi.'"

Making the final tally in the non-extended Cheney family three in support, one abstention, zero opposed. If the Cheneys had their own Senate, Liz would be a lock. But she might still want to do some constituent outreach.